The American Express Platinum is the original premium travel credit card. Not to be outdone by increasingly stiff competition, recent additions and upgrades to Platinum membership offer amazing value to the right travelers.

As Facebook’s big pivot to video continues, the company is partnering with two more production teams in order to wrestle up more original content for its Watch tab. Today, those combatants happen to be Machinima, which is launching a trio of new shows, and the WWE, which is planning a special 12-episode series…

In an age when bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to our best antibiotics and the words “E. coli” can shut down your favorite local Chipotle, people are desperate for anything that promises to wipe out germs. Unfortunately, when it comes to cleaning products that label themselves “antimicrobial,” they’re…

What happened to me? I used to be the sort of person that loved hearing about the flying cars we’d all enjoy in the future. The very idea was thrilling, the technology ingenious, the potential inspiring. But now, when we get emails about new flying cars like this one called the Switchblade, I find I’m just a cranky,…

It’s one thing to wake up and discover that you missed the boat on a cryptocurrency boom that’s making a handful of people very wealthy. It’s another thing to find out that your computer is making someone else rich while it gives you poor performance and jacks up your electricity bill. With the spread of…

Lyft, a ride-sharing company that was recently valued at $11.5 billion and has positioned itself as the “woke” alternative to Uber, has done some nice things to distinguish itself from its much larger, international competitor. It was the first to allow riders to tip drivers, it once encouraged users to sit in the…

I was never a comic book person growing up, though I was and still am a Star Wars person. But there’s no sense in not digesting everything that has the Star Wars name on it for the sake of staying a purist. Some canonical literature is fan fodder, and some is really, really good. Find what you like during this massive Star Wars sale from…

This February Google finally brought the Google Assistant from the Pixel and Google Home to other Android devices, but they were newer products like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and HTC 10. Older phone owners were stuck with upgrading or going Assistant-less. That changes now, the company announced on Wednesday that Google…

Plagued by infighting and the constant threat of a far-right insurgency, congressional Republicans have little to show after nearly 11 months at the helm of a unified government. The world-class fuckup that was Tuesday night’s Alabama special election, as extraordinary as it was, only adds further credence to the…

For almost anyone who grew up playing video games in the 90s, Super Mario 64 was a blocky rite of passage. But it’s not just gamers who have taken to the mustachioed hero lately. More recently, scientists have to begun to test whether games like Super Mario 64 could be used to keep people mentally in shape, thanks to…

This year I joined the Squatty Potty ranks, investing in one for the sake of my aggrieved gastrointestinal tract. My digestive system is reminiscent of Moses’ trek through the desert: nothing passes for 40 days and 40 nights. So I did what [apparently] everybody does: I watched a unicorn defecate a rainbow ice cream…

This week, the next chapter in the Star Wars saga finally hits screens. There’s excitement in the air, but before we dive into the new, we at io9 decided to glance back a couple of years and reminisce about The Force Awakens, the movie that kicked off this new trilogy, and what it still means to us going into The Last…

Last week recurring donation platform Patreon announced a change to its payments structure from an intuitive, once-a-month setup to a convoluted one that may as well have relied on used car salesman math. Creators and patrons alike made their displeasure known, loudly. Today the company’s CEO Jack Conte announced…

Oh, that Van Allen Belt—online crackpots love to use Earth’s belt of radiation to bolster their Moon landing conspiracies, suggesting it could be too strong for an astronaut to travel through (not true). But the truth is, scientists do think about the Van Allen Belt and its mysteries. They’ve launched probes to study…

Two hackers responsible for creating the massive Mirai botnet that knocked large swathes of the internet offline last year have pleaded guilty. The pair commandeered hundreds of thousands of connected devices that were used to hurl spam traffic at a Rutgers University server that contained a web portal used by faculty…